


Ivy League Material

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-20
Updated: 2006-09-20
Packaged: 2018-09-15 10:05:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9230120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: Sam's not the only smart one in the family.





	

_1998_

He'd never intended to go through with it. It was all a big joke, a way to get between Mary Ellen O'Shaughnessy's very tightly closed thighs.

She tossed her bright red hair and asked, "And you, Dean? Where are you applying?"

It was out before he could even stop it. "Cornell." Which, of course, was her dream school.

She eyed him skeptically. "And your safe school?"

"Don't have one." He grinned. "Don't _need_ one." Not like he was going, even if by some crazy chance he actually made it in.

"We can do our applications together," she said breathlessly, laying one well-manicured hand on his arm, her green eyes wide and bright.

"Sure," he replied, hoping that was code for fucking.

It wasn't.

He spent several afternoons with her, actually filling out the application. His grades were not bad--not really Ivy League material, but good enough that Miss Kandinksy (his very hot guidance counselor) didn't laugh in his face when he said he was applying to Cornell, though she seemed concerned he hadn't chosen a safe school. He didn't have any AP classes, and his only extracurriculars were baseball and, well, theatre (but only because those theatre girls were hot and they all put out, and it wasn't like he was _acting_ or anything lame like that--he just helped build the sets), but he'd scored a fourteen hundred on his SATs, with a perfect eight hundred in math.

The essay was a killer. They wanted him to write about an experience that had taught him something about the world. He wrote about getting hurt while hunting kelpies in Lake Superior, and triumphing over impossible odds, and Miss Kandinsky thought it was a metaphor for his high school experience. She was a _Buffy_ fan, though, which meant she was probably a little skewed anyway.

He even went on the interview they requested, wore his only suit and everything. He looked the recruiter in the eye, smiled his best smile, and danced around her questions about his checkered transcript like Barry Sanders on a touchdown run. She would have slept with him afterward if he'd been interested, but he didn't want to get accepted because he'd banged the interviewer, so he didn't.

He finally got into Mary Ellen's pants the day she got her early admissions letter--she'd gotten into her dream school and wanted to celebrate.

It didn't last long between them after that. He moved on to Missy Jacobs, and Sara Lobell, and Christine Carter, and then it was March, and an envelope arrived at the P.O. box he'd set up for himself when he'd sent the application in--an envelope from Cornell University offering a full scholarship (need-based; he certainly didn't have the grades to get one on merit, even if they'd given them out, which, he discovered, they didn't) and welcoming him as a member of the class of 2001.

After several moments of shock and the passing urge to grab Sam and ask if this was his idea of a really ~~great~~ lame practical joke, he tucked the letter into his secondhand copy of _The Brothers Karamazov_ (which he'd never bothered to actually read) and brought it to school in the morning. He showed Miss Kandinsky, who hugged him before realizing it might not be appropriate, which surprised him, but not so much that he didn't cop a feel, and damn, she had a nice ass.

He wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to be normal, to go off to college without the fear of bad things happening while he was gone, with Dad smiling proudly and--well, hell, it was his fantasy, wasn't it?--Mom alive and sniffling over her baby boy all grown up and going to college.

Then he laughed at himself for being an idiot, because maybe if he'd grown up normal, it'd be what he wanted, but now he couldn't even imagine the appeal.

He shoved the envelope into the box with all the other stuff he pretended he hadn't saved over the years--drawings Sam had made in kindergarten, letters from girls whose names he remembered, because they were girls from before the time he started looking at girls and seeing tits and asses instead of people, the lineup card from the first baseball game in which he'd been a starter, and pictures of Dad and Sam he'd collected over the years, mostly without their knowing it--and forgot all about it.

They left Portland before graduation, and he never looked back.

*

_2006_

"Let me do it." Sam grabbed for the laptop and Dean slapped at his hands.

"I'm not an idiot, moron. I know how to use Google."

"It'll be faster if I do it."

"It'll be faster if you stop trying to grab the keyboard while I'm typing." Sam made another attempt to take the laptop away and Dean said, "You are on my last nerve, Sammy. Don't even think about--"

"I'm not the moron here, jerkface."

"Jerkface?" Dean muttered, amused in spite of himself. "That's the best you can do, college boy? What are you, seven?"

Sam ignored him and poked at the screen. "It's spelled 'Tuchulcha.' God, Dean, you're never going to find the information we need if you can't spell it right. It'll be just like that time with the lenapizka."

Dean froze, just for a second. "We killed the lenapizka." Killed it, and then salted and burned the remains until there was nothing left but ashes. But not before two more people had landed in the hospital and Dean had ended up with a concussion and a couple of bruised ribs.

"We were lucky, and you know it."

"We make our own luck," Dean snapped, "because we're good at what we do. We found out how to kill the lenapizka, and it wasn't because of _luck_. Just because I don't do things the way you do--"

"Well, right now you're not looking either lucky or good, and we need to know how to kill this Tuchulcha thing before anyone else gets hurt. So if you'll just let me--" Sam grabbed at the laptop and this time, Dean let him have it.

He stalked out to the car and opened the trunk, feeling around for his lockbox. The metal was cool and smooth under his fingers, and he rubbed his thumb along the edge for a moment before unlocking it.

Most of the stuff in the box was old, faded, crinkly in the way of old paper. He found the envelope he was looking for and slipped the box back into the trunk.

Sam was hunched over the laptop, skimming through the same set of results that had told Dean nothing for the last twenty minutes.

Dean dropped the envelope down onto the keyboard, where it landed with a smack.

"What the--"

"You're not the only one with a brain in this family, Sammy, and it's about time you remembered that." He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, to make a joke of it, but his jaw was clenched tight around the words.

Sam opened the envelope, the glue on the flap long since gone cracked and yellow, and pulled out the letter, eyebrows drawn together in a frown of concentration for a moment before flying up in surprise.

"Cornell, Dean? Seriously?" His voice cracked; he sounded more excited than he had about anything in recent memory, and his mouth curved in a wide smile that made his whole face light up.

Dean smirked, some of his anger abating.

"Why didn't you ever say anything? Damn, man. Cornell! That's Ivy League. I didn't even know you'd applied."

Dean shrugged. "I knew I wasn't ever going to go--I didn't even really want to go, but there was this girl..." He shook his head. "Anyway. It didn't seem important."

"It was important enough for you to keep it all these years." Sam looked down at the letter again, ran his fingers over it gently, as if it would fall apart if he didn't handle it with care. Then he looked up again, laughing, realization dawning in his eyes. "You saved it to throw in my face, didn't you?"

Dean tried not to laugh, tried to play it off, nonchalant, but he couldn't in the face of Sam's obvious amusement; he had to laugh, too. "Yeah, okay, I guess maybe I did." Sam opened his mouth, and Dean could tell he was gearing up for some kind of touchy-feely, _I never thought you were stupid even though you act like a monkey sometimes_ speech, so he said, "Have you found out anything about the chalupa?"

"Tuchulcha," Sam corrected automatically, and Dean knew he couldn't help being a geek.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. How do we kill it?"

Sam shook his head. "Don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll figure it out." He left the _we're just that good_ unspoken. Then he cocked his head and looked at Dean thoughtfully. "So does this mean I've been the pretty one all along?"

Dean thwapped him on the back of the head, and they were back to business as usual.

end

**Author's Note:**

> *Tuchulcha is an Etruscan demoness with snakey hair and wings and a beak. I have no idea how to pronounce it.
> 
> **Lenapizka is an amphibious lake monster, according to the people of the Peoria tribe. I have no idea how to kill it.
> 
> ***In my imagination, Dean applied for the school of engineering.


End file.
